Contrary to what most people believe, NTFS is a POSIX-compatible¹ filesystem, and it is possible to use permissions on NTFS.

To enable this, you need a "User Mapping File" or just give the permissions option when mounting (when no compatibility with Windows is needed). This maps linux users on your system with the user IDs like NTFS/Windows use them internally.

So this will allow you to arbitrarily set permissions like chmod 655 /some/file on the NTFS partition mounted in Linux? I'm trying to figure out how to merge my home partition from linux into c:\Users. Will using usermap allow me to retain all the permissions? I was planning on mounting the c:\Users directory to /home in linux.
– trusktrFeb 13 '14 at 7:22

How are these permissions stored? In ADS? Other metadata?
– hexafractionNov 4 '12 at 19:47

What about fat32 ? I have a Micro sd card which is write protected and i cant access,format it.
– WaqasNov 8 '13 at 17:27

@RanaMuhammadWaqas - this is an old question, but you can also mount it with different options. Hard to know what your problem is, perhaps identify your hardware and ask a separate question.
– PantherNov 8 '13 at 17:28

@EduardoCuomo - Posting a comment in an answer stating it is not working is unlikely to help you. What file system ? I suggest you open a question. You need to identify the file system and post your fstab entry
– PantherFeb 27 '17 at 18:28

You can always explicitly invoke the script interpreter, in which case execution permissions are not required. If the script uses bash, as can be verified by looking at the first line of the script, just run

bash script.sh

Note that the script calls other scripts or binaries on the same partition, this won't work. Note also that the strategy doesn't work with binaries as opposed to textual script files written in Bash Script, Perl, Python or the like.

According to the Ownership and Permissions section of the NTFS-3G documentation, we can use mount options to control file access and creation. The combinations are very complicated (see the two tables there). Also I do not read and get all of them. For example, I do not know whether POSIX ACLs is selected at compile-time or not of the NTFS-3G binary package. But the best I have come out is using a User Mapping file combined with some mount options to approximate a plausible mapping of file ownership and permissions between Windows and Linux.

Warning: This is only what works best for my sharing a NTFS data partition (drive D: on Windows) between dual-booted Windows 8 and Kubuntu 14.04. The instructions are recorded in careful retrospection but not thoroughly tested. It is too tiring and tedious to repeat the whole procedure again. So follow it at your own risk. But if you do, share back your experience. If you decide to follow the instructions, please read it fully to have a whole picture before actually acting. Good luck!

Alright, here you go! The detailed instructions consist of three parts. Part 1 should be carried out on Windows while Part 2 on Linux. Part 3 is for test.

Part 1

The User Mapping section of the NTFS-3G documentation specifies two versions to set up user mapping between Windows and Linux, one Windows version and one Linux version. My experience was that the Linux version ended up with a miss. The Linux account was not mapped to my Windows account but some unknown account appeared under an SID. The result was a mess since this unknown account takes ownership of all files of my Windows account. In that situation, unless you have an administrative privilege to take your ownership back, files under your Windows account become inaccessible. But even if you mange, it is still a wrong mapping. That means, later whatever files you create on Linux get assigned to that unknown account on Windows and those on Windows get assigned to root on Linux (if I remember correctly). So on Windows you need to take ownership back again and on Linux change ownership. That is not what we expect it to be. After several hopeless attempts to fix the issue, I gave up and turned to the Windows version. That one worked. Detailed instructions extracted from the relevant section of the NTFS-3G documentation follow:

Presumably, the first SID should be your user SID while the second your group SID. You can check them respectively by commands whoami /user and whoami /groups.

After you make sure the SIDs are correct, following the instructions in the comment, that is, change user in the user::SID line to your user name and group in the :group:SID line to your primary group name on Linux. On Ubuntu, they are the same. Moreover, add your Linux group name also after the first colon of the user::SID line. So the line should look something like user:group:SID. It seems that if not doing so files created on Windows will be assigned to user:root on Linux.

Save the file. Move it to a directory named .NTFS-3G (create it if not existent yet) on the NTFS partition to be shared (in my case drive D:).

This step is for test in Part 3. On the shared NTFS partition, create a new directory and a new file.

Part 2

Now boot into Linux. sudo edit the file /etc/fstab. Add or modify the line for the shared NTFS partition to something like the following:

UUID=... /data ntfs defaults,umask=077,utf8 0 0

The essential is to set the umask (dmask and fmask may also work but not tested). Pick a value for umask you like, although I picked 077. It seems without this setting, full permissions will be given to others for newly-created files.

Part 3

Now (still on Linux) cd to the mount point (in my case, /data), ls -l the files there. Check whether their ownership and permissions match respectively that you specified in the UserMapping file and the umask you set in /etc/fstab (the match between permissions and umask requires some complement calculation, see man (1) umask for more information). If they do, congratulations, half goal is achieved. Otherwise, poor you. Ask Ubuntu or Windows.

Then create a new directory and a new file. ls -l to check their ownership and permissions. The ownership should be your user name and primary group as usual. The permissions should match the umask. Now restart your computer and boot into Windows. Locate on the shared NTFS partition the directory and file you just created on Linux. Check their properties to see if they are assigned to your Windows account. If they are, congratulations, you are all done. Otherwise, bad luck. Ask Windows or Ubuntu.

EOF

Old thread, I know, but still relevant and missing a particular use case tip, composed from different suggestions on various other forums/threads and tested on Ubuntu GNOME 13.04 where I wanted an external drive to hold a Steam library...

When the NTFS partition is on an external usb drive, for example -- which means the partition is mounted on the fly upon connection -- then you can use the following method to make udev mount ntfs partitions with execution rights.

Open a terminal window and do:

$ sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/90-usb-disks.rules

Then paste this line in what should be a blank/new file (if not, then exit nano and reissue the command but starting the file name with a higher number like 91-...):

WARNING WITH WINDOWS OS!

I check it with Windows 7+ and the permissions affect Windows OS! I change the permissions of my Home Directory on Windows partition, and when I used Windows again I could see that the user was broken!

Mount NTFS partition in a USB drive with custom permissions and owner

In Linux the mode of NTFS (and FAT32) is determined by the partition's mount options. You cannot change it via chmod.

Assumption: the USB drive is seen assdb1, modify to match the drive letter and partition number in your case. The general syntax is sdxn, where x is the drive letter and n is the partition number as seen by for example sudo lsblk -f

@alhelal, I am afraid that the hardware of your USB drive has become read-only or 'grid-locked'. But there might also be some problem with the file system, and if the file system is corrupted, you might be able to fix it by repairing it in Windows, either with the GUI method or with the command line chkdsk /f X: according to this link ubuntuforums.org/… -- If still no luck, backup the data and try according to askubuntu.com/questions/144852/…
– sudodusNov 29 '17 at 17:21

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